Employee thriving and engagement are moving in opposite directions for the first time in a decade. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report shows thriving rose to 34% while engagement fell to 20%, its lowest level since 2020. The findings challenge a decade of corporate wellness spending and raise hard questions about whether wellbeing programs address the real causes of workplace disengagement.
The data that got my attention
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report contains a finding that should stop every HR leader mid-sentence. Employee thriving increased to 34% in 2025, up one point from 33%. That is the first improvement in three years. At the same time, employee engagement fell to 20%, down from 21% in 2024 and 23% at its 2022 peak. This is the first time global engagement has declined for two consecutive years.
Thriving and engagement are moving in opposite directions. Workers are feeling better about their lives. They are also less psychologically attached to their work, their teams, and their employers. If your company has invested in wellness stipends, meditation apps, and mental health days, you may be solving the wrong problem.
Why this matters now
The decoupling of thriving and engagement creates a dangerous blind spot for leaders. When wellbeing scores tick up, leadership teams declare victory. The wellness program is working. But engagement, the metric that tracks whether people actually care about their work, keeps falling. The result is a workforce that feels okay but works disconnected.
Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2025, roughly 9% of global GDP. No region on Earth improved engagement last year. Each percentage point of engagement represents approximately 21 million workers. The three-point drop from the 2022 peak means 63 million employees slipped from engaged to indifferent or actively disengaged.
The thriving increase, while positive, does not offset the engagement decline. Thriving measures life satisfaction. Engagement measures workplace attachment. A person can feel good about their life while doing the bare minimum at work. That is exactly what the data is showing.
What the research actually shows
Gallup’s wellbeing research, conducted in partnership with the Wellbeing and Planet Earth Foundation and PERSOL, identifies three drivers of thriving: enjoying work, feeling it improves others’ lives, and believing you have choices in what you do. These are intrinsic factors. They come from the nature of the work itself, not from perks layered on top.
The engagement data tells a different story. Manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. The largest single-year decline happened between 2024 and 2025, when manager engagement fell five points from 27% to 22%. Individual contributor engagement sits at 19%. The gap between managers and the people they lead has nearly vanished. The “engagement premium” that used to make management worth the extra stress is gone.
The table below shows the divergence between thriving and engagement alongside the manager engagement collapse.
| Year | Employee thriving | Global engagement | Manager engagement | Non-manager engagement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 35% | 23% | 31% | 20% |
| 2023 | 34% | 21% | 30% | 18% |
| 2024 | 33% | 21% | 27% | 18% |
| 2025 | 34% | 20% | 22% | 19% |
Leaders themselves illustrate the paradox most clearly. Leaders report the highest engagement (26%) and thriving (43%) of any role. They also report more stress (46%), anger (33%), sadness (34%), and loneliness (31%) than individual contributors. Compared to the people they lead, leaders experience +7 points of stress, +12 points of anger, +11 points of sadness, and +10 points of loneliness. Leaders think their lives are going well. Their daily experience tells a different story.
A practical framework for leaders
The thriving-engagement paradox requires a two-track approach. You cannot sacrifice wellbeing to chase engagement, and you cannot substitute wellness perks for the work of building engaged teams. Here is a framework that addresses both.
Audit the manager layer first. Managers account for 70% of variance in team engagement, according to Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis of 2.7 million employees across 112,000 business units. If your managers are disengaged, no wellness program will fix the downstream effect. Start by measuring manager engagement separately from overall engagement.
Redesign work for intrinsic reward. Gallup’s thriving research shows that employees who enjoy their work, feel it helps others, and have autonomy report higher wellbeing and engagement simultaneously. Job design, not perks, drives both metrics.
Invest in manager development, not just wellbeing. Only 1 in 3 managers naturally have the talent to manage, according to Gallup. The rest need training, coaching, and support. Best-practice organizations achieve 79% manager engagement, nearly four times the global average of 22%.
Stop treating thriving as a proxy for engagement. Track both metrics. If thriving rises while engagement falls, you have a structural problem in how work is organized, not a wellness gap.
Address the leader emotion gap. Leaders are experiencing worse daily emotions than the people they manage. Burned-out leaders cannot build engaged teams. Executive coaching and peer support are not perks. They are operational necessities.
The bottom line
The data is clear. Wellbeing is improving. Engagement is not. The companies that treat these as the same problem will keep pouring money into wellness programs while their best people quietly disengage. The companies that separate them will invest where it matters: in the quality of their managers, the design of their work, and the emotional health of their leaders. The $10 trillion engagement gap is not a wellness problem. It is a leadership problem.
Where to go from here
Before investing in another wellness platform, measure where your managers stand. An engagement diagnostic that separates thriving from engagement, and manager engagement from team engagement, will show you exactly where to invest. If your managers are part of the 22% global average, no amount of meditation apps will close the gap. leadership workshops →
